What lives
Year to year. Annuals are flowers that last the summer and die with the frost. Cherish them. Water them. Enjoy! We plant again in the spring. Start over. Cherish them…
Street photography
The streets are not exactly teeming with folks. But there are subjects in view and fair game for my camera. People? Animal? Life, activity, bustle and hustle? Ummm, well, maybe a bit laid back and less hustle, but colorful and interesting, nonetheless. It is a glimpse into daily life. Mundane it ain’t.
Getting around
We chase wildlife. Sheep, cows, it doesn’t much matter. We do fiber which starts with fleece and goes from there. I can now process a fleece to spun yarn. Actually, Colleen does it all. I help. But it is a fun thing. The family that works together…. Or, is it, the family that plays together…?
Wedding
At my age not too many weddings occur. I suppose that is not true. All the kids, nephews and nieces… ha ha. There was only one girl, Jules on my side of the family. She’s married already. Well, there are a few more – two more…. It was interesting to see who brought who to the wedding. And it is equally telling to see who is still together. One of us has declared he is gay. I guess the girl he brought was a beard. I am still with Colleen. Some might have mixed feelings. Not us!
Success
Success does not depend upon the food. The food is the centerpiece. Does it matter. No. it is the people. It is family. It is gathering together after three long years of covid separation. We survived. Some had it. Twice. We were fortunate to have missed Covid. Safe? No. There is a positive number for new cases and deaths. But the risk? is at acceptable levels. All the old recipes were pulled. My turkey was made in our new oven which overcooked the bird in less time than we expected. No one complained. It was as though we were seeing long lost relatives. Mistakes were made. And everyone had an excellent time. No one went away hungry.
Eyes
If I have learned nothing else, it is all about focus and the eyes in portraiture. Cat, humans, whoever whatever you shoot, it is sharp focus on the eyes that makes the picture. If you can do that, then you break all the rules. Or, any rules….
I run around camera in hand trying to get pictures. The cats merrily romp. The never cooperate and mostly never look in my direction. I have lots of tricks. I make strange noises. Distraction or draw their attention? You would never know. Note: all cats did not cooperate for these pictures; none were harmed.
Got eyes? Ok! Try and get fur. You need texture in the fur. Black cat? It’s near impossible. White cat? Ditto! There is so much to remember while you chase focus on the eyes. Yes, comical – a grown retired surgeon making strange noises and hand gestures while chasing after cats who could care less.
So long ago
…way back in 2018. Merry Christmas to all!
Jules was pregnant and ready to have my first grandchild on my side of the family. Oh boy! A California Christmas. It was no white Christmas but it was unforgettable. Surfing. Fireworks. Christmas lights.
Santa makes the season unmistakable. It’s a lifetime ago. Jules has two kids. Things have changed so much in so many ways. I made an ornament. Colleen’s suggestion and idea brought to fruition. Now we gotta find more wood blocks for the grandkids. It’s been a nice few years since this one.
All the best to you and yours on this holiday.
Plural of mouse
The plural of mouse is mice. And so, the book reads, “T’was the night before Christmas and not a creature was stirring not even a mouse.”
Jules got me. She was about four or five. The illustration is of two mice. Aha! Plural mouses! She asked, “Which is the mouse? Which is the mice?” Of course the mices have names – Mouse and Mice! Every night she stopped me at this spot and asked her questions. I was stumped. One mouse, two mouse, but which are the mice? Which? Is the word “which” singular or plural? We never did clear it up. I remember to this day. And I am still at a loss for explanation. Some books – mercifully!!! – only illustrate one “mice” in the picture. It makes things eminently easier!
Cookin’
You’re never gonna see my kitchen this neat again. The first frost. Dawn. The thanksgiving countdown. Covid is over. At least we are unrestrained and there has been a cooking explosion in my house in response to three years of deferred holiday celebrations. We got food coming from all directions. Cooking. Baking. Oh my! Colleen made mincemeat pie… and tarts. Ummm, no can I not have another, please, And, yes, of course, the cats help!
She baked bread. She laughed. I was so bowled over by the professional quality of her bread…. It tickled her so….
Meringue cookies. I had leftover egg whites. Internet! The NYT now makes you pay for recipes. No need! Wow! They came out phenomenal. I kid you not. Jane got a cold and stayed away. Lee arrived a day late. Eric??? Let the family games begin!! I should know better by now. We just got over the worst colds… No one, I promise, will go away hungry.
When I say “neat,” it simply means you see empty counter surface. Ha ha. (Shhh… three big storage bins of food are in the elevator. Yeah, we got an elevator… )
No backs
It will always be thus. You regret the pictures you did not take. And you continue to not take the very same pictures you regretted going forward into the future. Eh? Why?
There are almost no group pictures of me and my brothers as adults. We gathered regularly especially at the holidays. We lived close enough to be at one another’s homes. Group pictures with the family were done pretty regularly. Sentiment? Anyone? Did anyone? Well, there are images of us individually and so forth. You cannot go back and shoot again. And it appears no one else has the sentiment. Had the sentiment. Will have the sentiment. Do better? No, I fear it’s just more of the same. Hold on to those you love tightly.
What is there to say?
Happy holidays!
Family photo time! My timing was poor. Colleen said no and had a fit. We were just getting over severe colds and she was sleep deprived and still coughing. Plus, we were in a cooking frenzy a few days before Thanksgiving. Ha ha, it ain’r a pretty picture.
Take seven cats and ask them to cooperate. Right?! Each was frog marched up to the table and forced to look at the camera. Cooperation was at a minimum. Jen laughed at how happy Willow looked to be there. The passable shots were melded. Voila!
We got photobombed. Spice is over Colleen’s left shoulder. So, I got eight cats and didn’t know it.
Happy Holidays from our Family to yours.
If you are going to do this, then go for it. Multiple shots and poses. It took about 130 shots in all. And no, it was not perfect. But this is all tongue in cheek. Eh?! A few years back the ladies in the drug store giggled. The peeked at my prints and were impressed that the cats all lined up. With straight face I told them I have trained cats….
As you can readily see Colleen came around to my way of thinking. We truly do love our cats.
“Ok! All you guys, get up on the table and smile. Now!”
Head scratcher
Speaking of badness… I got to see and treat this guy. Holy!?!!?..shit. Ummm, he walked around with this obvious lump sticking out of his head…for a long time. We took it off/out. He lived happily ever after. You would think I would remember him vividly. I don’t. I took care of so many strange and wondrous things. This was no doubt bad! But it was in a day’s work. Some days you just can’t make this shit up. Better out than in.
Badness
I discovered that you can take pictures of x-rays or screen images for the purpose of documentation and giving talks about the pathology you are treating and operating upon. It is mucho badness. Nothing good caused these patients to require care and surgery. There are of course happy endings in which the patient recovers and is saved and lives happily ever after. That is what I would like to remember. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way all the time. I recently came across a cousin who’d had some operation upon her neck. Every one of the relatives spoke of it in hushed awe. She was so much better. ??? next I saw her I took her hand and tested her quickly without comment. Curiosity? Mine. What the hell magical surgical cure had she had? A cervical laminectomy. No anterior neck scar. And she had a positive Hoffman’s sign with wasting of the dorsal interosseous muscles. . End stage cervical myelopathy. There is no way to spin happiness or a happy ending from this finding. Note to self: keep mouth shut. I did.
Know
It’s a long time since I knew Dave. True on so many levels.
He grew up. Did I know him as a kid? He’s an adult with a life and travels and work that I can barely follow. He has taken on many hobbies and projects known only to himself. Skateboard? He did it for a short period and then dropped it. Why? Why did he start? Why did he stop? Did he get good at it? Dunno. There’s a lot I don’t know.
Keeps good record
GIGO – old computer term – garbage in garbage out.
As good a photographer as I am and I am not… one takes pictures and looks back to realize that I really did not take pictures worthy of remembrance. They are “snaps” of poor quality that capture the idea, an anchor of the memory of the moment without really capturing a sharply focused image.
These images recall a moment and a memory. I coulda done better. But I have them. They make me smile and remember what happened once upon a time. No one’s gonna hang anything on the wall. Family friends events, some smiles, mostly imperfect. But hey! I got something to show. And I got better? Maybe? Or not!
Did it get better?
You get better with age and experience. Unfortunately, at the beginning you know squat. And the early mistakes will always follow and haunt you. My database was on index cards transferred to an Excel spreadsheet.
It is parsimonious for key words and information. You will not find slide cabinet as a key word to look up.
Equally, my slides are stored in drawers. The rolls are consecutively filed. One set of drawers resides in a closet stacked one upon another impossible to comb thru easily.
Digitized with a dedicated (out of manufacture) slide scanner, the images reside on multiple redundant hard drives. Good? Eh? No, the slides were scanned in batches on different dates and reside in multiple places. Try to find and follow consecutively, only I know how to look. Oh bother!?
But everything is preserved – except my earliest black and white negatives. They live in my brother’s house somewhere.
Meanwhile I know where my stuff is. No one else does. And it can be pretty near impossible for me to find things too.
Nothing is lost
Pfewf!
How chaotic is your file system? Your storage system? Slides? Digital is easy. Negatives reside somewhere lost in my past. There were a lot of boxes of black and white negatives stored away somewhere.
When I started shooting slides, I began to develop my own not too long after. That was hell. Try to hold a water bath within a tenth of a degree for 30 minutes while the developing tank requires constant agitation. I bought cardboard mounts, ten thousand at a time. Heat sealed, I used our iron more than my wife.
Storage. At first it was fine. I stored box upon box in the top shelf of our bedroom closet….until space ran out. Then it was a closet – floor. Finally we build a custom cabinet. That was $$$. Hey! I was a neurosurgeon with a $$ budget. But even those drawers were eventually full. How many slides? Near to 110 thousand. Who’d think that would take so much space! I was cheap now. That last cabinet was simply too many $$.
So, I planned and built one. I had no experience building drawers. I borrowed a table saw. The kids pitched in. We built 26 drawers and a cabinet out on the deck in the NYC weather come what may.
To illustrate – I went on a search for the pictures of the project. To be sure I had not that long ago seen the pic of Jules on the deck helping. Aha! Find it?! Sure?! My organization is only as good as the information storage. I had scanned the picture/slide? Or… aha! Dammit. And this is funny. I took pictures of the new slide storage system with a digital camera. Oh! Rich! Digital to document film. We did this project in the summer of 2003. By the next summer I would be switched over 100% to digital with my purchase of the Nikon D70. Little did I know what was to come.
Meanwhile chaos again, as if you might care for my plight. The initial set of drawers was a built in. There have been a couple moves since then. 28 or so drawers sit in a closet again. Ha ha! And the cabinet I built sits in my office. 26 drawers built to last a lifetime storage of slides. It is half full of what was anticipated, the other drawers empty. Who knew the future and what would come of my slides? But, disorganized is the operative word. Operative? Ha! I still have dreams about doing surgery.
Organized
Not! Chaos!? Organized!
Hey! I know where my stuff is!? Sort of!?
No doubt time blurs things mightily.
Do I remember where things are? No. Will anyone else? There is a database – two. Will anyone know to make sense of it all if I am not there to guide them? Ha ha.
I found everything. I can find everything. I scanned all the early slides except for the medical ones. Who cares? Meanwhile everything is preserved. There are lists.
Organized, it ain’t.
Gee! When was my mustache so dark? This particular set of pics is roll #1759 where there was a break in the Lightroom catalog requiring a switch of catalogs to continue. The year? 1992. Yeah, yeah, confusing confusion. It reigns. Madness!
Whimper
I recall vividly that the last slide I shot was at Dave’s graduation. Little did I know or suspect film would so suddenly be gone in my life. I just simply never went back. I did not look back. And I have not shot a roll of film since my Nikon D70 arrived late after I got home from work. Who knew?!
Nothing of import was on that last roll of slides. The deck, my dog, Dave, the school play and some flowers numbered among the mundane subjects. Interesting to see. I had never really checked until now.
Better?
Film, camera, photographer? Did anything get better? I certainly changed gear as often as I pleased during my career as a neurosurgeon. The money was there. Did $ a better photographer make? Ha, a loaded question. Pun?
Good or bad, we lived thru interesting times. 2000 – day, date, millennium, decade, year, century. Not too many can match that. It came and went with barely a ripple though there was the Y2K worry.
That one pic is about the only picture that survives my childhood. I was about four and it was Christmas. I remember that couch from Astoria NY to Elkins WV.
Everything old…
…is new again. In the 1950’s it was frontal lobotomy done with a knitting needle up your nose. In the 2000’s we discovered we could electrically stimulate areas of the brain and get rid of depression. It was strictly regulated by psychiatrists. Few operations are done with this technique. And now, we are back to the age old question: “Who’s crazy? And, who’s to say?” It has always been far easier to answer whether you have a brain tumor or not since CT scan was invented in the mid 1970’s. Ah! Life was a lot more simple back then.
Friends and family
No matter. We drift apart. I got family I have not spoken with in decades. Friends? It is so much easier to get lost and never be in touch again. Think about it? Do you? Do I? I have my regrets. There is too much guilt that wells up. But I do have one big do over if ever there was one. Family is forever. You are bonded whether or not you see them. Friends? I think so too. It’s harder to make family than friends. It’s hard to hold on.
Unforgiving
Slide film. My early years. Slide film is pretty unforgiving. Oh sure… Photoshop. No, not really. The film was not forgiving of technical error – exposure, focus, and so forth. Then again, digital requires skill too. My early catalog of slides looks blurred, softly focused, overexposed….was it me or the camera or the film? I got better? Statement or big question mark? Bottom line, I documented life around me. The slides are better than having nothing. They looks dated.
Jules always said she could tell digital from slide. I did not quite believe her. Now? I think she’s smarter than me – than I was. Admit it. I wuz wrong! Do over?
Two years
Two years ago, covid pandemic, we ventured out – to the antique store. Cautious! Precautions! What did we see? What do we collect? Old cameras – a few. Spinning wheels – ha! Sewing machines – a few, done! Blue willow china – more please. Christmas carolers – oy, expensive! Santa – where you find one. Ornaments – ok, but of course. Beer steins – at the right price. When is enough enough? I guess it is the lure of the bargain, finding something of value for less. It’s like a lottery. Sometimes you win. Or, maybe you never do. All I can say is that I am happy to be in the game. Yeah, yeah, I take pictures in the antique store. Of course! It’s free to look!
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